It's only a matter of time before they'll try again, but for now the McGreedy directive, which would've extended copyright protection in the EU to 95 years, has been stopped.

VirtualDub 1.9.1 has been released. It contains many changes in the renderer and filters area and a long list of bugfixes.

eac3to 3.15 demuxes Blu-ray subtitles with a DTS set to 0, fixes some issues with 24.975fps framerate, handles WAV files beginning with a lot ot zeroes and properly sets the error code if it cannot detect the source file format.

ProgDVB 6.05.01 contains improvements for TSB devices, imports JVT in EPG, has two new OSD windows and many small improvements and fixes.

BDSup2Sub 2.6 once again fixes a few issues.

Three strikes and you're out.. if only we could have that for the RIAA/MPAA's perpetual attempts to get their "three times accused of filesharing gets you cut off from the Internet" style legislation. After New Zealand canned their plans, the EU once again didn't go for it. Sadly, it's only a matter of time before somebody brings the same agenda on the table again.

BDSup2Sub 2.5 fixes a few issues.

BDSup2Sub 2.4 has improved HD DVD support, improves handling of fully transparent colors, automatic language selection only considers file name, uses bilinear scaling when scaling down, there's better exception handling and the duration in the edit dialog can be entered as a float.

Other than suing people and trying to pass legislation to cut off alleged fileshares from the Internet without due process, the music industry is out of ideas on how to make money in the digital world - so it's up to the artists to come up with better ideas. Like the Songwriter's Association of Canada's idea of a voluntary $5 fee for unlimited filesharing. Does anybody else feel reminded of what Napster was rumored to be when it restarted after being shut down by the music industry?

BDSup2Sub 2.3 splits the export dialog into a conversion dialog and an export dialog, has a completely reworked time stamp checking mechanism and an edit dialog to change offsets and timestamps, has a new check/fix for very short display durations and there's an automatic selection of the language if the filename contains a language name.

DVDSubEdit 1.501 fixes a bug that could crashes in some special cases.

Undoubtedly due to public pressure, the New Zealand government has decided to scrap to three strikes legislation currently on the books and start working on something new.

In another example that copyright lobbying is decidedly non partisan, the current US government has come down on the same side of the issue as the previous one: In a brief about an ongoing RIAA case the government holds that statutory damages for copyright infringement are not inappropriate.

Good news: AACS processing keys for MKB v9 and v10 have been found. Unfortunately, current discs already use version 12.

If you don't pay close attention these days, 0xdeadbeef will have released more new BDSup2Sub versions than you can count - we're now up to version 2.2.

Then, we have the first free DVD-A software player which doesn't care about watermarks. The RIAA is going to be thrilled :)

Speaking of the RIAA - apparently they haven't quite conquered the Irish ISP market just yet as the Internet Service Provider Association of Ireland has refused to go along with the music industry's plan to cut off people's Internet access without due process.

The same thing is currently being discussed in New Zealand - and Google has decided to chime in. Their submission gives a frightening glance at just how rampantly DMCA takedowns are being abused.

Other than suing people and buying (or duping?) politicians to try and pass laws to circumvent due process - the RIAA is also coming up with other new ways to make money: While they're dead set against flat-fee licensing, they're still quietly pushing a music tax to universities. Turns out, that tax is only good for them as paying that tax neither makes downloading okay, nor will they stop their fight to take sites offline that they don't like - so you end up paying a tax to download from a site that might not be around tomorrow.

Last but not least in music industry news, this is the current state of three strikes legislative proposals in the UK.

MP3 just won't die - after mp3PRO, MP3 Surround and MP3D we have MP3HD which is a backward compatible way to losslessly store audio.

ProgDVB 6.05 has an improved OSD, supports per pixel transparency, has a new skin, shows more information about channels and there's more but I haven't found a list.

BDSup2Sub 1.9 supports HD DVD SUP subtitles, shows the same values for source and target FPS and fixes a target image size issue introduced in version 1.6.

tsMuxer has been updated in rapid succession the last few days - version 1.8.30 no longer needs fixclpi, fixes splitting, fixes TrueHD issues and problems with forward/backward and chapter skipping are also gone.

DivX 7.1 has a new player skin, supports AVC/AAC in MKV if you have the media pack or pro version and has an updated AAC decoder. There's still no encoder that gives you all the configuration options though.

LG has announced two new Blu-ray burners. The BE08LU and BH08LS will burn BD-R discs at 8x speed and dual layer discs at 2x. There's no word about HD DVD, and the pictures I've seen show no HD DVD logo so I guess the time to stock on on existing dual mode drives has finally come.

Speaking of hardware, VIA has announced the VX855 media processor - for intel's Atom CPU - which can handle 1080p - presumably at Blu-ray bitrates.

Another one falls: Vodafone - the world's largest mobile carrier, is going DRM free. They have yet to get Warner onboard though.

As the music industry is trying to ram a copyright extension through the EU (as usual trying to bypass the bodies of the actually elected people), here's one thing you can do other than contacting your reps in Brussels: sign the petition.

Finally, from the "it's all about the artists" department - the Featured Artists Coalition is a coalition of artists looking after their own interests and their goals don't always seem to be in line with the ones of the record labels.

BDSup2Sub 1.7 works from the commandline, uses optimized RLE encoding, tries to add better fake timestamps to various packets and contains some minor tweaks and corrections.

DGAVCDec 1.0.9 has an option to to display HD content in its original size and fixes some bugs. DGAVCDecNV 1.0.13 fixes an audio problem. DGVC1DecNV 1.0.6 has a rudimentary TS trimming function, allows demuxing of all audio streams for an MKV file from the commandline and fixes various issues and I suspect by the time you're reading this, we'll also have a new version of DGMPGDecNV.

Last in software news today we have SMPlayer 0.6.7 which adds experimental support for dvd menus, can load external subtitles without restarting the player, allows you to specify audio and subtitle delays and there are some other subtitle improvements.

Then some "RIAA/MPAA kick you off the Internet" news: the idea is coming in South Korea (albeit somewhat toned down it seems), the French version has finally made it to parliament, and not all ISPs in New Zealand seem to be onboard with the plan either even though the industry is pulling all the registers to defend the measures as reasonable.

Then some hardware ideas for HD media playback: HABEY's BIS-6550HD is a fanless, Atom based nettop with a 1080p hardware decoder capable of Blu-ray playback. The box uses standard components but there are no details as to which chip does the heavy video lifting. Put in a dual core chip and make sure the box can handle 2650x1600 and I'm in.

Meanwhile, intel's next generation chipset for nettops is still incapable of handling Blu-ray content. Now where are those ion boxes?

Wanna bet that our favorite 4 letter organizations (along with big pharma and patent trolls everywhere) will be asking for their heads on a platter shortly? Economists at a St. Louis university say patent and copyright law are stifling innovation and threatening the global economy.

BDSup2Sub 1.6 can write SUP subtitles.

eac3to 3.14 fixes the broken WAV reading introduced in 3.13 (which counts fields and frames separately, has a Dirac bitstream parser, supports 24.975fps content, writes PTS values from Blu-ray subs to both PTS and DTS, refuses to join MKV files and removes the last chanter if it's less than 10 seconds from the end).

tsMuxer has been updated several time these last few days up to version 1.8.24 but there haven't been any changelogs for a while.

ProgDVB has also been updated to version 6.04.06 - it includes bugfixes and supports Windows 7.

Finally, here's a little abbreviated version of what I saw at CeBit. And if you think Promise has a big RAID,wait until I present the 50 bay box I saw - the same manufacturer also has a 48 2.5" bay model for those that need less storage ;)

A little update before I'm off to CeBit:

BDSup2Sub converts Blu-ray subtitles to SUB/IDX files while also being able to add delays and/or change timestamps.

eac3to 3.12 fixes a bunch of issues.

ProgDVB 6.04.04 contains some bugfixes.

Now that HD DVD is buried, they're bringing back the old ideas anyway: HD DVD releases with a DVD side were not an uncommon sight when HD DVD was still viable, but now the originally Blu studios are getting into the dual format market as well: Rather than gluing a DVD side to the Blu-ray disc, they simply put a regular DVD into the Blu-ray package.

And in what must feel like bitter irony for all the folks that supported HD DVD, Warner - the studio who started HD DVD's demise - is now supporting China's variety of HD DVD.

If they managed to pass this in the EU, why not in the US? The idea of data retention is back on the table. To make matters even more out of whack, the proposed legislation could even force home users to keep records.

When will they try again? The EU parliament once again ruled against cutting people off from the Internet without due process when the MPAA/RIAA/etc. accuse somebody of wrongdoing.

Shortly before the new New Zealand copyright law containing the "RIAA/MPAA kick you off the Internet" clause would go into effect, it has been delayed "to see if the sector can make it workable".

Other than pushing their "kick you off the Internet" agenda, the content industry is also busy pushing ISP level blocks of sites they don't like. Top of their list: The Pirate Bay. I wonder how much money they paid under the table to get Irish ISP's Eircom to agree to that when ISPs in various other countries have refused (including the most recent example of Norway's Telenor)

Meanwhile, in France, "kick you off the Internet" legislation is making its way through the lower chamber of parliament where President Sarkozy's party, which supports the legislation, has the majority. So the French could get such legislation as soon as this month. Hopefully, the fact that Sarkozy himself has just been caught red handed in major copyright infringement case himself will have some people rethink your position - but make sure you remind your elected officials that while the RIAA/MPAA may pay their bills, it's still you they have to answer to come time for reelection.

Older news can be found here.